Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

From the balcony we had a perfect view of the last operations around Tash Kîshla. That great yellow barracks will be memorable in the annals of the Turkish revolution. Many an officer is said to have been tortured there on suspicion of being connected with the Young Turks. It was there that a detachment of the imperial guard fired on the first sharpshooters brought up from Salonica to replace them. And there a battalion of those same sharpshooters, who had been corrupted into fomenting the late revolt and who knew how little quarter they might expect from their old comrades, held out desperately, long after the other barracks had given in. The last act of the tragedy looked less real than a stage tragedy on that divine spring afternoon while we watched, as from a box at the play, the white-legged figures crouching behind their wall, the farther figures stealing up the side of a sunny road, the sortie of the last handful of sharpshooters from their shot-riddled stronghold. They took refuge in a garden before the barracks, where rifles blazed and men dropped until a desperate white handkerchief fluttered among the trees.

The surrender of Tash Kîshla—the Stone Barracks—practically completed the occupation of the city. But the tension was not over. There were yet three days of uncertainty, of waiting, of a strange sense in the air of contrast between the April sunlight and dark forces working in silence. For Yîldîz, as ever, remained inscrutable. From the top of Pera we could see, across the valley of Beshiktash, the scene of Friday’s Selamlîk. No sign of life was visible now at the archway in the Palace wall, on the avenue leading to the mosque. Had the Sultan surrendered? Had he abdicated? Had he fled? All we knew, until the end, was that white flags floated over two of the imperial barracks and that white leggings nonchalantly appeared on Sunday morning at the Palace gates. In the meantime Shefket Pasha, the man of the hour, continued to secure his position. The redoubtable Selimieh barracks, scene of Florence Nightingale’s work in Haïdar Pasha, he took on Sunday with half a dozen shells. On the same day he proclaimed martial law. No one was allowed in the streets an hour after sunset, weapons were confiscated, suspicious characters of all sorts were arrested, and the deserters of the garrison were rounded up. Thousands of them were picked out of row-boats on the Bosphorus or caught in the open country. The poor fellows were more sinned against than sinning. The most absurd stories had been spread among them: that the invaders were Christians come forcibly to convert them; that the son of the King of England intended to turn Abd ül Hamid off the throne in order to reign himself; that if taken they would all be massacred. Dazed by all that had been told them, lost without their officers, worn out by the excitement and confusion of the last ten days, their one idea was to get back to their Asiatic villages. On Monday morning several hundred of them, including the remnant of the Tash Kîshla sharpshooters, were marched away to the court martial at Chatalja. The rest, who were merely the victims of an ignorant loyalty to their Caliph, were sent to Macedonia for lessons in liberalism and road making.

Burial of volunteers, April 26

Photograph by George Freund

I wondered whether it were by accident that the prisoners sent to Chatalja marched down the hill by which their captors had entered Pera, as preparations were being made on the same height, since named of Perpetual Liberty, for the funeral of the first volunteers killed. A circular trench was dug on the bare brown hilltop, and in it fifty ridged deal coffins were symmetrically set toward the east, each covered with the star and crescent and each bearing a fez at the head. Then a long double file of whitecaps drew up beside it, and a young officer made a spirited address. Not knowing, in my ignorance, who the officer was or much of what he said—he turned out to be the famous Nyazi Bey of Resna—I wandered away to the edge of the bluff. A few tents were still pitched there, overlooking the upper valley of the Golden Horn. Seeing a camera and hearing a foreign accent, the men were willing enough to be photographed. They were from Cavalla, they said, where an American tobacco company maintains a factory. One of them offered me his tobacco-box in English. He had lived two years and a half in New York. When I got back to the trench the soldiers had gone and the coffins were almost covered. One officer was left, who made to the grave-diggers and the few spectators a speech of a moving simplicity. “Brothers,” he said, “here are men of every nation—Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews; but they died together, on the same day, fighting under the same flag. Among us, too, are men of every nation, both Mohammedan and Christian; but we also have one flag and we pray to one God. Now, I am going to make a prayer, and when I pray let each one of you pray also, in his own language, in his own way.” With which he raised his hands, palms upward, in the Mohammedan attitude of prayer. The other Mohammedans followed his example, while the Christians took off their caps or fezzes and crossed themselves; and a brief “amin” closed the little ceremony.

Deputies leaving Parliament after deposing Abd ül Hamid, April 27

Photograph by W. G. M. Edwards

By Tuesday, parliament having returned to town the day before, and having sat in secret session with no outward result, people began to say again that the Sultan would keep his throne. As the morning wore on, however, there began to be indications of a certain nature. In Pera Street I encountered a long line of open carriages, each containing two or three black eunuchs and a Macedonian soldier. The odd procession explained itself. The eunuchs were from the Palace. Some of them looked downcast, but the majority stared back at the crowd with the detachment supposed to be of their nature, while a few of the younger ones appeared to be enjoying an unaccustomed pleasure. It was not so with a procession I saw later, crossing Galata Bridge. This was composed of the lower servants of the Palace, on foot, marching four and four between a baker’s dozen of sardonic Macedonians. There was no air of palaces about them. Some were in stamboulines, frock coats with a military collar, that looked the worse for wear. Others wore a manner of livery, coarse black braided with white. Others still were in the peasant costume of the country. They were followed by the last of the Palace guard, shuffling disarmed and dejected between their sharp-eyed captors. A few jeers were raised as they passed, but quickly died away. There was something both tragic and prophetic about that unhappy company.